Russia Outward

My story is pretty long and strange
- growing up in the Ukraine, on the other side of the Iron Curtain which
was slowly vanishing then, my opportunities to hear music were rather limited.
First records were those two by the early Beatles released by the only
legal record label of the USSR - Firma Melodiya: A Hard Day's Night
and Taste Of Honey - back in 1988. Perestroyka was coming
and soon there appeared the great "Archive Of Popular Music" LPs - the
first one was a bad compilation of the Doors, 2nd - early Stevie Wonder
stuff, 3rd - Creedence Clearwater Revival, 4th and 5th - The Rolling Stones
1964-65... all of them influenced me a lot. Some strange tapes came
- and some music articles started to appear in the local press. My friends
and I discovered the mysterious PUNK-movement...there were weird pics of
hardcore punks with incredible haircuts and No Future-slogans...enough
to impress us all heavily. I formed a band with my school-mates willing
to play punk rock (the journalists used to emphasize the fact that all
the punk bands were amateurs which suited us perfectly). But there
were no punk records around - Melodiya was publishing neither Pistols nor
Clash. I remember the excitement of first listening to Closer
by Joy Division - the guy who gave the tape to me said it was punk....
We learned this lesson and started playing, using three acoustic guitars
and home-made drums and recorded a couple of terrible albums inspired mostly
by Joy Division and the awful tape of Never Mind The Bollocks, which
was soon found in Moscow.

Then I took part in a students' exchange program (1990) and lived
two weeks with an Italian family in Bologna meeting some wonderful people.
One of them, the English teacher Vincenzo, took me to his apartment once
and gave me 5 cassettes which I was to fill using his unbelievable collection.
I came back to the Ukraine with some fantastic tapes: Velvet Underground
& Nico, Dead Kennedys, Substance by Joy Division and some angry
punk stuff like Mentors and Crucifix. The Velvet Underground became
my absolute favorites. I formed another band, playing different music.
The whole local scene - meaning all the non-commercial bands were under
heavy influence of Sergey Myasoeov. This guy owned all the right
music of the time and was an expert: you could find the most obscure
things at his place - all the 4AD bands of the time, Nick Cave, Neubauten,
Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Coil, Swans etc. He shared his addiction
to the indie-scene and gave inspiration to some very spectacular acts which
disbanded in some years and are extremely underrated today. These
include Kazma Kazma which played the modern guide to medieval music, ELZA
(Ukrainian Talking Heads/Velvet Underground thing... they were the first
local band that toured abroad - with an American duo Sabot that based in
Czechoslovakia then), Foa-Hoka (very dark... first experiments with electronics
in the industrial direction...they released an album in Poland) and some
others. They all formed Novaya Scena-union and Sergey became the
Maclaren of it (the whole scene was documented by the CD Underground
in Ukraine on What's So Funny About? that introduced Europeans to the
scene).

The first independent radio appeared around 1992, playing mostly
indie-music and classic rock - the DJs were mostly the musicians.
I took an active part in organising the third FM station in my city, becoming
one of the first DJ's there. X-Radio was the weirdest radio in the
area, playing a wide range from ABBA and Queen to the Sex Pistols,
Pixies and Nirvana. Grunge was "in" then, being treated as a kind
of our revenge to punk. More amazing discoveries of the time in no
particular order - Smiths, early Cure, Crime And The City Solution, reggae,
David Byrne's Rei Momo (one of my fave records still), Sonic Youth,
Faith No More, Iggy Pop (Stooges), Birthday Party, Zappa (Joe's Garage),
Can....

The small remains/survivors of Novaya Scena were very disappointed
and fed up with everything connected to rock'n'roll and were searching
for a new alternative. I was close to some of them and also got into
Satie, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, etc. Someone brought a tape of
the first Mr. Bungle album which was a very important experience; soon
some late Naked City appeared - I guess it was Grand Guignol.
It was unbelievable - completely different from all the stuff we've been
listening to. The information that the main guy of Naked City
[John Zorn] produced the Bungle record was great news. Smth by Ribot
and Frith appeared at the same time and was deeply appreciated.

I left the Ukraine 4 years ago and live in Germany now. The commercial
aspect of the modern music brought some big disappointments about the ways
of show business. Zorn and the related artists became very
important to me - as much as the way of solving the problem and reaching
the audiences without selling out.

After two years I joined the band Unterwasser, formed by the guy
who was in the Moscow band Srednerusskaya Vozvishennost', which I used
to listen to when I was 15-16; released a CD with them and recorded a new
one some months ago. (www.freespeech.org/unterwasser)
Recently have been listening to - Boredoms - Wow 2, Ruins - Burning
Stone, Mingus - Reincarnation of a Love Bird, Kletka Red - Hybrid,
Tortoise - TNT, Bar Kokhba, first Massacre, Laswell's Charged
live boot, Bungle - California, The Angels Of Light - New Mother,
La Monte Young, Martin Denny, Moondog - Sax Pax for a Sax.

.... well, that's the story so far. Thanks for reading this
- I had to share it with somebody.